


Interstices of Time

by kymericl



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 02:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kymericl/pseuds/kymericl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Like a panicked bird, Death flees at the threat of determination: not the desire to contintue fighting, but the determination to remain alive.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Interstices of Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atlanticslide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlanticslide/gifts).



> Wishing you a wonderful Yuletide!  
> & an enormous thank you to my beta, profcricket.

It's mind versus matter when it comes to death.

Like a panicked bird, Death flees at the threat of determination: not the desire to contintue fighting, but the determination to remain alive. But how tightly can you hold on to life before it slips through your fingers? Because that is the ineffable, incalculable balance: Death may retreat, but the retreat is always temporary, and you can no more hold Life in your hands than you can carry a beach away, handful by handful of sand. Like sand slipping between your fingers, no matter how tightly you squeeze them together, Life trickles back into the great abyss, back into a place unknown and immeasurable.

It _is_ a game really, just as Welsh tried to tell Blithe; but it’s not football.  Not by a long shot.  Life is nothing more than a limited time frame in which living beings are granted to attempt to accomplish things: goals, dreams, ambitions.

In the end no one wins, but some people like to think that they can. Some people see life as a challenge; if they can manage to complete this _one_ thing more, if they can articulate this _one_ thought in a cohesive manner – then everything will be different, except in the respect that nothing will change. At some point or another, when they are least expecting it or when they feel they have fully prepared themselves, Death stumbles in unannounced, gate-crashing the surprise party and baffling all those around.

The real pain is the waiting. Waiting as you walk on point through a minefield,  eyes down and ears up, and praying that each delicate step will keep you around longer. You'll be satisfied with a fraction of a second, because it’s _life_.

Time really does slow down when you're being shot at. Bullet-time: the hallucinogenic distortion of perception. It lulls the people who experience it into a false sense of comfort: _I have all the time in the world_.

Battle-time both is and isn’t the same. Like a game of hide-and-seek, you crouch in your perfect hiding spot, waiting with adrenaline-fuelled patience while the seeker (a bullet, a mortar, a shell) examines every hidey-hole and crawlspace available. And like a vicious older sibling playing with a toddler, or a cat toying with a mouse, the seeker already knows where you are, but likes to draw it out. They'll wait until the last second, just when you think you're safe, to sneak up from behind and call you out.

In war, death is all around. It's a commonplace thing that civilians have the luxury of ignoring (unless they’re in a war zone too), but which you are forced early on to accept. Death exists for everyone, but soldiers get invited to the party early. And whether you want to or not, it's inevitable to dance with Death in a fire fight – every _zip!_ past your ear, every close call, every wound no matter how insubstantial, is a reminder that the difference between life and death is a hair's width. It’s a hell of a dance – but no one wants to be asked Home. Every soldier wants _just one second longer_ , because in that second, Death might grow bored with them, might let them pass on the dance, and move on to a partner briefly deemed more fitting. You breathe a sigh of relief, but it’s with the full knowledge that someone you probably know, maybe even love, has been selected to tango with the inevitable in your place.

That’s called guilt. But that’s something else again.

War isn’t really a challenge, or at least not a fair one: the outcomes are too arbitrary. It has more to do with luck and chance, because skill and tactics can't always save you.

You can run through the enemy lines once, even twice, but a third time is pushing it. But you do it anyway.

You can use yourself as bait for a sniper, and instead of dead you only come away breathless.

You can offer your foxhole to a friend in need and suddenly, unexpectedly for you both, simply _not be there_ between one breath and the next as he crawls for cover.

You can reach out to a fellow soldier and be shot for your troubles.

You can light a shaky cigarette and try to figure out why some good deeds are punished with such severity.

Death doesn't see good deeds or bad ones. Death doesn’t hate; neither does it discriminate. Death accepts all willingly (all are welcome, all are welcome). Death has a job to do.

And if you’re a soldier, you’ve got a job that needs to be done, too, and you can't get all squeamish when you're called upon to do it. Every time, date, place, and circumstance is marked. You just can’t see them is all: those times, dates, places and circumstances are engraved on stone tablets, somewhere, but even if you found them, the inscriptions have been worn away by the elements over time, leaving them indistinct to mere humans.

But they’re never forgotten. Not after, and not in advance.

But sometimes... Sometimes, the deadline is extended. You get another chance. There’s no rhyme or reason to who gets another chance and who doesn’t; it’s no reflection on the state of your soul. So what will you do with your extension? Will you do good with it, or be bitter for the rest of your life? And in the more immediate moment, will you waste that chance, or use it to fight? Not fight in a war, but to fight for another moment, another extension, and another, and another. Will your extension be reduced to seconds, or can you make it into years?

Being grateful is the logical choice. You can let those _of the time_ be resentful; you can let men with no physical wounds bear the anger for you.  They’ll be happy to. They’ll be happy to be so angry that they would pulverize one of their own.

You're not around to stop them, after all. And you have to focus your energy on other matters.

Healing.

Playing out your seconds into hours, hours into days, days into years. If you can.

Because sometimes, Death rides past, not fazed by your whimpering and prayers, intent on keeping other appointments. (And sometimes, Death stops to set up camp indefinitely, and no one is quite sure who's been invited to the picnic. Last suppers or no, soldiers would rather go hungry.)

There are superstitions prevalent in war that dilute into civilian life. Ron is of the firm impression, the unshakeable belief, that a soothing, familiar voice whispering shaky words of comfort will work wonders for Chuck's physical state. But Ron isn’t good with words, never has been. So he uses touch to substitute. He holds on, fingers stroking reassuringly in the unconscious man's hand. (And perhaps, if he holds on tightly enough and gently enough at the same time, Death will choose some other appointment to keep, not out of pity but because Ron’s got _just enough_ strength for both him and Chuck.)

And when that incompetent doctor claims that all hope is gone, Ron rejects his half-assed pronouncement. He’s well aware that he’s fighting Death itself – and not on his own behalf – and he’s got no time for useless humans. The men around him can join the struggle or fall by the wayside. Ron pushes; the doctor falls away; and Ron wastes no time in writing his own version of the future.

Death remembers hearing about him, this human, a loner loitering at the fringe of the group. In truth, Death is fascinated by him, this human who has no compunction in killing his own kind, yet now seems to be willing to fight the things he can’t touch to save one of his kind.

It's not hope; Ron doesn’t believe in hope.

It's determination.

And there's still a chance, because they're working with bullet-time. Seconds may be racing away faster than Ron can chase them, but as far as Chuck knows, Time has slowed to a crawl.

In Chuck's world, the microsecond before he's shot is the longest one of his life, when Realization married an explosion of gunpowder and stinging metal faster than any man could move: but Chuck _saw_ that bullet, saw it race toward him with ungodly speed as if it had taken hours.

The pain from the bullet merges with the pain from the surgery, inseparable, but decidedly different. The pain from the bullet forces his chute to jam, his ripcord useless in his fingers; the pain from the surgery deploys his reserve. For a while, it looks as though he's going to land in a tree, tangled and defenceless in enemy territory. But then the trees vanish from the landscape, and he sees Curahee, stark and bare against the sky. He _knows_ this; he’s done this, a thousand times before – and suddenly, he’s not alone.  The whole of Easy Company is running with him. And they’re in the air with him, too, as he falls, over Benning, right over Ramsbury, over Normandy, over Holland, over the snowy hell of Bastogne. He sees faces he hasn’t seen since D-Day, and faces he’s seen every day since then. They’re all with him: all of Easy Company.

Easy, with the addition of Dog Company’s former platoon leader.

His reserve chute opens with a pop; he pulls upon the risers, and falls upon the grass.

The landing is rough, but he's not complaining, because he's made it.

He’s alone again now, on the ground, but has the strange feeling that he hasn’t missed his DZ. That’s fine: he’s done this before, too.

Clouds are grey here, in this No Man's Land, this deserted wasteland. Equipment and artillery decorate the surface, burnt out almost to the point beyond recognition.

But there's laughter and joy somewhere deep beneath the surface. Warmth and love, mingled with barely-concealed displeasure. Amidst all the death, life prevails. Surrender is not an option: too much has been sacrificed to arrive at this position.

There's a very real danger once he has traversed No Man's Land and reached the other side. This danger is relapse, perhaps, or self-pity.

But it's a danger he is willing to face, an enemy he doesn't mind fighting. Too much has been given, by too many good men he’ll never see again, for him to reach where he is now. He hasn't fought so hard and for so long to have everything collapse _now_.

He can see a light burning from behind his closed eyelids, but he’s not afraid, because he knows that the light isn’t Death or Afterlife but a bare bulb, hanging from a ceiling in a hospital.

He remembers words, whispered shakily in the utmost of extremities, can hear the echoing. He feels hands on his again, the same hands he remembers from – when, when was that? – from before. Sometime. Hands that comforted him as his chute failed and his reserve popped open; hands that have stroked and caressed every inch of his body. Hands he would know anywhere.

He stirs, his languor caused now by anaesthesia rather than encroaching Death.  The fighter in him exults: the drug is even easier to cast off than the bullet.

He stirs, and feels a mouth by one of his ears, whispering words of comfort, of tenderness, of love, words Ronald Speirs would never imagine ever letting any other man hear him say. Not because Ron would be embarrassed, but because those words are meant for him, and him alone. They are private.

And they are triumphant.

Death has slipped away again, into the interstices of time from which it came.

 


End file.
